Fracking Headlines…

Phibro’s (currently Astenback Capital Management) Andy Hall knows a thing or two about the oil market – and even if he doesn’t (and it was all luck), his views are sufficiently respected to influence the industrial groupthink. Which is why for anyone interested in where one of the foremost oil market movers sees oil supply over the next decade, here are his full thoughts from his latest letter to Astenback investors. Of particular note: Hall’s warning to all the shale oil optimists: “According to the DOE data, for Bakken and Eagle Ford the legacy well decline rate has been running at either side of 6.5 per cent per month… Production from new wells has been running at about 90,000 bpd per month per field meaning net growth in production is 25,000 bpd per month. It will become smaller as output grows and that’s why ceteris paribus growth in output for both fields will continue to slow over the coming years. When all the easily drillable sites are exhausted – at the latest sometime shortly after 2020 – production from these two fields will decline.”

The companies that once operated the wells have all but vanished into the prairie, many seeking bankruptcy protection and unable to pay the cost of reclaiming the land they leased. Recent estimates have put the number of abandoned drilling operations in Wyoming at more than 1,200, and state officials said several thousand more might soon be orphaned by their operators…

Here, we must look to U.S. tight oil production, for it has been responsible for the vast majority of oil supply increase for the past several years. But we have good reasons to believe that the trend of the last two years, where tight oil production added 1 mb/d each year, will not continue in 2014.

Data in the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report indicates that 70 percent of new production in the Bakken shale, and 77 percent of new production in the Eagle Ford shale, will be needed just to make up for the decline of rapidly depleting legacy wells. Unless drilling rates increase substantially from current levels (and there is no indication that they will), growth is set to moderate considerably in 2014.

David Hughes, the Canadian geoscientist whose refreshingly transparent work on shale gas and tight oil I have regularly featured, presented persuasive new data at the 2013 Transatlantic Energy Security Dialogue event I attended on Dec. 10 in Washington, D.C.

In March, I highlighted his model for U.S. tight oil production, which forecast that it could peak in 2016 at a level not much higher than today. With almost a year of additional data to go on, Hughes now calculates that Bakken production could peak at just over 1 mb/d in 2015, and the Eagle Ford could peak at around 1.4 mb/d in 2016. (This assumes that drilling gradually declines from 5,500 wells per year currently to 3,000 wells per year when the fields are drilled out.) Hughes estimates that the two plays will likely see an end to drilling in 2025, and that their combined production will likely fall to nearly zero by 2035. This scenario, in which the combined total recovery from both fields is 11 billion barrels (1.5 billion barrels have been recovered so far), assumes there are no constraints on capital expenditures (“capex”) for drilling, and that 80 percent of more than 70,000 drilling locations are accessible and economic…

The Daily Camera first reported that the Colorado Community Rights Network is planning to submit the language for a ballot measure as soon as next week that would flip the tables on pro-fracking groups…

Bakken Crude Found More Dangerous to Ship Than Other Oil
Mark Drajem, Angela Greiling Keane and Lynn Doan, Bloomberg
Safety rules will probably be tightened on crude oil shipments from North Dakota following a string of railway explosions, threatening to damp an energy boom that has boosted the region’s economy.

U.S. regulators issued a safety alert after a train carrying oil crashed and caught fire earlier this week in North Dakota, where surging production has helped lead a renaissance in domestic energy and driven the state’s unemployment rate to the nation’s lowest.

The type of oil pumped from the shale formations of North Dakota may be more flammable and therefore more dangerous to ship by rail than crude from other areas, the Transportation Department said in the alert. Regulators are considering imposing tougher rules on railcar construction, among other things, potentially raising the costs of moving the crude to market.

Pipelines could be affected as well.

Shale Gas: Killing Coal without Cutting CO2
Shakeb Afsah and Kendyl Salcito, CO2 Scorecard
It is well known that natural gas generates only half the CO2 of coal for every MWh of electricity generation. However, there are two offsets that nibble away at these CO2 savings. The first is the component of natural gas generation that displaces nuclear and renewable sources of energy that have no emissions. The second is methane leaks. Using the US electricity sector data for 2012, we show that even at a low leakage rate of 1.22% (USEPA’s estimate for power plants comparison) the two offsets combined were sufficient to almost erode the entire annual savings in CO2 from coal-to-gas fuel switching.

Feeds: Mendo Island & Independent News

Sea Chantey (Oxford, 1861) There is an insect that people avoid (Whence is derived the verb “to flee”). Where have you been by it most annoyed? In lodgings by the sea. If you like your coffee with sand for dregs, A decided hint of salt in your tea, And a fishy taste in the very […]

Today, a new psychological repression hides in plain sight. It is the servant of a modern ideology, a religion really, that says the material world is soulless and merely fodder for economic growth. This repression prevents most from seeing our ecological predicament and therefore from understanding it or acting in response to it. This repression is of the v […]

Global Coal Boom Ends As China — And World — Wakes Up To Reality Of Carbon Pollution | It's not Climate Change - It's Everything Change | Hillary Clinton has a renewable energy plan, but she still needs one for fossil fuels | Study: We've wiped out half the world's wildlife since 1970 | Against Forgetting...

In an interview during the 40-hour standoff in Portland, Luke Strandquist describes what it’s like on the front line of standing up to Shell Oil.By Katherine Bagley Cloaked in early morning darkness, 13 Greenpeace volunteers climbed over the edge of the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Ore. on Wednesday and rappelled down climbing ropes so they could hover 100 […]

Hundreds of corporate giants have rallied to urge governors to see the upcoming regulations as a boost for the economy.By Katherine Bagley Three hundred sixty-five companies and investors sent letters on Friday to more than two dozen governors supporting the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to significantly reduce carbon emissions from power plan […]

(Houston Chronicle)Shell launched Arctic drilling on Thursday by sending a specialized bit spinning into the bottom of the Chukchi Sea, as critics protested against the campaign. The company now has until Sept. 28 to drill the top portions of up to two wells at its Burger prospect about 70 miles northwest of the Alaska coastline, but after fixing a damaged i […]

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is proposing an interstate compact to defy federal law and "shield" states from the EPA's imminent Clean Power Plan.By Naveena Sadasivam With the Obama administration poised to issue its sweeping rules to cut carbon pollution from power plants, a Texas-based conservative think tank is making a far-fetched bid […]

According to this permanently-smiling Christian, the Large Hadron Collider is a horrible idea because God did away with the Tower of Babel.So, you know, logic.The video gets really "interesting" around the 5:05 mark.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who thinks atheists are missing out because we don’t have cool hats like other religious people, says there are some Protestants who believe in a childish version of faith… [According to atheists, religious people] are also supposed to believe in a God who answers prayers here below and gives us goodies if [Read More...]

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

What is not worth doing, is not worth doing well. ~Abraham Maslow

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Zeno Stoics

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~ Cicero